Pre-existing asthma as a comorbidity does not modify cytokine responses and severity of COVID-19

Abstract

Background A significant portion of COVID-19 sufferers have asthma. The impacts of asthma on COVID-19 progression are still unclear but a modifying effect is plausible as respiratory viruses are acknowledged to be an important trigger for asthma exacerbations and a different, potentially type-2 biased, immune response might occur. In this study, we compared the blood circulating cytokine response to COVID-19 infection in patients with and without asthma. Methods Plasma samples and clinical information were collected from 80 patients with mild (25), severe (36) or critical (19) COVID-19 and 29 healthy subjects at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK. The concentrations of 51 circulating proteins in the plasma samples were measured with Luminex and compared between groups. Results Total 16 pre-existing asthma patients were found (3 in mild, 10 in severe, and 3 in critical COVID-19). The prevalence of asthma in COVID-19 severity groups did not suggest a clear correlation between asthma and COVID-19 severity. Within the same COVID-19 severity group, no differences were observed between patients with or without asthma on oxygen saturation, CRP, neutrophil counts, and length of hospital stay. The mortality in the COVID-19 patients with asthma (12.5%) was not higher than that in patients without asthma (17.2%). No significant difference was found between asthmatic and non-asthmatic in circulating cytokine response in different COVID-19 severity groups, including the cytokines strongly implicated in COVID-19 such as CXCL10, IL-6, CCL2, and IL-8. Conclusions Pre-existing asthma was not associated with an enhanced cytokine response after COVID-19 infection, disease severity or mortality.

Plasma tissue factor pathway inhibitor levels in coronavirus disease 2019 patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Of 83 articles, 77 articles were excluded because 38 articles were duplicated, 7 did not report related data, 18 were review articles, 6 did not stratify TFPI levels according to disease severity or just reported temporal changes of TFPI levels, one was a case report, one was invitro study, one was viewpoint, four studies were without healthy controls, and the results of one study about TFPI value was correlation analysis on the reported data in Al-Tamimi et al [25] work that we had included this data in the analysis, so it was removed. Finally, with the agreement of both reviewers, six articles remained for analysis [25][26][27][28][29][30], as shown in Fig. 1.…”

“…Three of the six studies were prospective, two were cross-sectional, and one was retrospective with a total of 684 cases and healthy controls, of whom 180 were healthy controls and 504 were COVID-19 patients with different severity (76 mild, 292 moderate, and 136 severe) (Table 1). The severity classification of COVID-19 was defined according to the WHO guidelines in three studies [26,28,29] PRISMA flow diagram demonstrating the data gathering process to finding out coronavirus disease 2019 effect on tissue factor pathway inhibitor levels. Data from [31].…”

“…In four studies [26][27][28]30] the factor values were significantly higher in patients, and in one study, [25] the factor value was lower (nonsignificant) (Table 1). In addition to these, there is another study by Kelliher et [25,[28][29][30], which in three studies, the factor value was significantly higher in patients [28][29][30], and in one study [25], it was significantly lower (Table 1).…”

“…Of these six studies, three included COVID-19 patients with mild illness [27,29,30]. Out of these three studies [mild (n ¼ 76), healthy controls (n ¼ 81)], in two studies [29,30], the mean TFPI values were found to be higher in COVID-19 patients with mild illness compared with healthy controls, and in one study [27], it was lower, but the differences did not reach statistical significance in any of these three studies (Table 1). In the pooled analysis, the SMD of TFPI values in COVID-19 patients with mild illness compared with healthy controls was 0.68 ng/ml (95% CI À0.64, 2 ng/ml; I 2 : 92.9%), as shown in Fig.…”

Features of COVID-19 in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchial asthma, and cardiovascular comorbidity

“…По данным литературы, частота встречаемости бронхиальной астмы (БА) у больных Covid-19 варьирует в достаточно широком диапазоне -от отсутствия до 9% [4,5,8]. Наличие астмы у больных Covid-19 не было ассоциировано с более частой госпитализацией [9], тяжелым течением, повышенной летальностью [10,11]. Некоторыми авторами показано, что у госпитализированных больных БА уровень сатурации при дыхании комнатным воздухом оставался высоким, кроме того, у них определялись низкие значения С-реактивного белка (СРБ) и ферритина [12].…”